Blog 79 posting

Another bit of Golden Gate ... enjoy!

Sergeant Mackey fired off several M-79 grenade rounds beyond the PUFFs ahead. “This is going to be one memorable clusterfuck; with no monkey.” The rifle fire never stopped. Sometimes the bullets were intermittent visitors, but occasionally became steady. Bullets zipped by, AK-47 rounds from the trees and elephant grass ahead, and the PUFF’s rounds ripping through the leaves, branches and mud where Charlie must be. Nothing ricocheted; the vegetation, rain and the mud sucked up the bullets as if some island god hungered for bullets. 

Available now at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com as an e-book.

Blog 78 posting

Progress has been made; however slight, it has been encouraging. A draft Glossary now exists for Sooley Base.

The struggle continues to merge the disconnected bits and pieces of thought, storyline, characterization, and action – into a somewhat more coherent, credible tale. As I work through the process nuances emerge, characters become more real, and bits and pieces of random acts of action move hither and yon. Hopefully it will all work out by the end of the year. That is when I hope Sooley Base will hit the streets. The same approach as used in marketing Golden Gate will be used, the prix fixe of www.bookbaby.com. I have not as yet had the courage to check on sales, but here is the data describing Golden Gate –

Golden Gate, by DP Tolan

Tagline - He woke frantically - Why were Arabia's worst terrorists working at a gold mine, and were America 's nuclear wastes really buried beneath its sands?

Product Details

·                                 ISBN-13: 9781618427670

·                                 Publisher: BookBaby

·                                 Publication date: 12/1/2011

·                                 Sold by: Barnes & Noble

·                                 Format: eBook

·                                 Pages: 190

·                                 Sales rank: 944,278

·                                 File size: 788 KB

·                                 Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Available now at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com as an e-book.

Blog 77 posting

It turns out I won’t get to today’s writers group meeting. We’re heading to see Offspring at college (he needs a few more books).

I discovered a major OOPS in the second novel; it is a two year chronological omission that I need to work around. Fortunately there are ideas that fit perfectly into the breech. Still working on the sequence, characters involved and actually reworking the various segments into the rough chapters. Who knew writing could be such drudgery. Ah well, there’s always the thoughts of royalties.

Sooley Base word count hovers around 53,000, a comfortable value at this point. Pone needs to recognize that this includes a certain degree of duplication in the segments, before they’re pulled together and rewritten (several times).

Another tidbit from Golden Gate, the first novel of the Tessera Trilogy –available now as an e-book from Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. The setting is Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

As he walked to his barracks he heard it. The sounds grew louder as he approached the hooch.  That’s the Animals – We gotta get outa this place. That fits! He’d share this place with a dozen other JO’s and would come to treasure its infrequent tranquility. The most memorable feature of the hooch was its artwork, which he saw on entering. Its most endearing piece proclaimed it all!

The poster was of a truly menacing soldier. He was weathered, covered with camouflage markings and twigs, elephant grass, mud, sweat, and every conceivable weapon. He had a butt hanging, almost falling, out of his mouth, and looked like hellfire to come. It read in bold, intimidating letters - “Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil – For I am the toughest Mutha in the Valley.”

Blog entry 76

Well it’s time for an update.

I have no further Orthopedic or physical therapy requirements, and can drive. That increases my mobility, so I’ll be back at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library volunteer job next week.

I’ve developed and am still revising a Characters Book for the Tessera Trilogy novels. It has pages identifying the essential bits of information on the characters of Golden Gate, Sooley Base, and Kashan Kashmeeri, the three novels of the trilogy.  The characters are tough to identify, name, and describe in a credible way. The characters, lets say from the Mossad, Israeli Defense Forces, Military units of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, several news organizations, and sundry others, have to be named credibly (or humorously), and fit within the settings and action of the respective novels. This continues to be a daunting task. They then have to be credibly incorporated in the segments of interacting scenes. The characters have to be put in the correct sequence, and have credible bits of intelligence, action plans or responses, and be well sequenced. Then, of course, I have to rewrite and resubmit them for scrutiny and correction by my colleagues of the writers group.

I need to be ready with the first segment of Sooley Base to read and have critiqued at next Saturday’s Writers Group meeting.

The beat goes on. Work is progressing, and I hope to edit, annotate and put a segment of film on You Tube to bring some attention to the trilogy and Golden Gate, which is on sale via Amazon.com and the Barnes and Noble website. Rock on!!!